Progress reported at crippled nuke plant

By JOHN M. GLIONNA, LOS ANGELES TIMES

December 16, 2011

Photo: Hiro Komae

HIRO KOMAE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
CONCERN: While Friday's news was positive, the body language of Japan's Nuclear Crisis Minister Goshi Hosono, left, and Tokyo Electric Power Co. President Toshio Nishizawa, right, indicated that deep concerns remain about the future of the Fukushim-Daiichi nuclear power plant and its threat to the environment.

HIRO KOMAE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
CONCERN: While Friday's news was...

SEOUL, South Korea - The Japanese government declared Friday that the tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had ceased to leak substantial amounts of radiation, achieving a condition that suggests a critical stable state known as a "cold shutdown."

The announcement came more than nine months after the earthquake-generated tsunami struck the coastal plant March 11, knocking out its cooling system and eventually causing a series of meltdowns.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's statement to Cabinet members was intended to reassure Japan and the rest of the world that the nation is moving beyond its nuclear nightmare.

But critics say the plant, stricken by what many call the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, is continuing to cause harm and that it will take decades to fully decommission it.

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Moving forward

Officials say they can now move forward with assessing dangers at evacuation areas.

In the days following the disaster, some 80,000 residents were evacuated from communities around the plant after the reactors spewed radioactivity into the air, sea and soil.

A 12-mile off-limits zone around the plant is expected to remain in effect for years, Japanese authorities acknowledge.

Officials had predicted they would reach the cold shutdown state by early 2012.

The government's declaration Friday in support of claims by the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., that the reactors have reached that crucial point is one step toward encasing the plant in concrete as a precaution.

Still, Friday's announcement was carefully worded, with officials suggesting that the plant had reached cold shutdown "conditions," since the utility cannot measure temperatures of melted fuel in damaged reactors as precisely as it could in normal facilities.

Facility operators conceded that engineers will not be able to remove spent fuel from the three worst-hit reactors for 10 years, but say they may begin removing fuel from storage pools within two years.

Better system

Engineers said establishment of an improvised cooling system to circulate water through the damaged reactors helped create the more stable state.

They also have set up a system to decontaminate water that becomes radioactive in the process.

But earlier this month, plant operators announced that 45 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from that filtration system.

Officials later acknowledged that some of that water had reached the Pacific Ocean. Critics say the leak contradicted assurances that environmental damage at the plant 220 miles northeast of Tokyo had now been limited.

The radiation in the water from the most recent leak measured up to 322 times higher than government safety limits for various types of cesium.

Experts also worried about the detection of strontium, which they said remains in the human body much longer than cesium, and therefore presents a graver health hazard.

Some independent sources have estimated that 80 gallons or more of strontium-tainted water has run into the ocean, twice the amount claimed by plant operators.

Environmentalists blasted the government's claims of progress at Fukushima.

"By triumphantly declaring a cold shutdown, the Japanese authorities are clearly anxious to give the impression that the crisis has come to an end, which is clearly not the case," Greenpeace said a statement.

The earthquake and tsunami left more than 20,000 people either dead or missing along Japan's northeast coast.